Robots.net Disk Crash

Posted 18 Sep 2004 at 04:20 UTC by steve

Robots.net suffered from a major disk crash last night. A shiny new hard drive has been installed and the site has been restored from the most recent full backup, which was made September 12. The bad news is that we've lost anything that happened between the 12th and 16th including posts, replies, blog entries, and new user accounts. The good news is that we've restored the other 4 GB of content. And I was able to restore the last few articles thanks to Google's cache of the site.

Thanks, posted 18 Sep 2004 at 05:32 UTC by NateW » (Master)

Thanks for keeping the site alive. It's appreciated. :-)

hard drives, posted 18 Sep 2004 at 13:18 UTC by steve » (Master)

I'm curious what brand of hard drives others have had the best luck with lately. We've had several hard drive crashes (on other servers) in the last year - all Western Digital Drives. Prior to that, I've only had such a high crash rate with Maxtor drives. We have a lot of IBM/Hitachi drives and they have a 0% failure rate so far. All I could get on short notice for this server was a Seagate barracuda. I haven't used Seagate drives since my BBS days in the 1980s but I seem to recall they were fairly reliable. Anyone have any opinions or experiences gained from recent hard drive failures they want to share?

disks, posted 19 Sep 2004 at 19:12 UTC by jaiger » (Observer)

I tend to use either Seagate or IBM/Hitachi for clients and mission-critical use. We also ONLY use SCSI disks as they come with 5 year warrantees whereas IDE is often 30 day or similarly short. If anything is telling, I'd say the warrantees are.

I have a few el-cheapo IDE disks in use at home and am starting to build a parity raid array out of them as I'm nervous they will fail on me at the most inopportune time.

All important data is also backed-up to tape. Something I recommend to everybody.

-joe

Hard drives, posted 21 Sep 2004 at 20:27 UTC by Sleepsalot » (Observer)

Here at my school we use 98% Western Digital drives ranging from 10gb to 40gb most of our drives are mounted in removable sleds. We may have a failure rate of 2% which is good . We have some where around 300 drives. And the drives are taken in and out of our machines every day and night. Our students have 2 courses one Mon. Weds. class and one Tues. Thurs. class for days. And we have night students with the same set up. The biggest problem we have is at the start of a new term. The drives get reallocated and the machines may or not need jumpers on the drives. Most of these drives arre at least 2 yrs. old.

Wayne

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